You can sign up for Proton mail without providing email or phone number, as far as I recall.

Disclaimer: I’m not a social worker or other mental health professional or anything in any way related to those.

I’m a bit over twice your age though, so I’m speaking based on my experience in life.

There’s a lot of things I wanted to do. I wanted to be a nurse, I wanted to go to university/college, I wanted be a programmer ect ect but I just couldn’t.

All those occupations you listed require very specific types of intelligence. I fully agree with the poster above who said that there are many different types of intelligence. To expand on that a little, someone may be the best car mechanic or cook in town but be a terrible programmer or nurse. And vice-versa, a great programmer may be a terrible nurse, mechanic, cook, etc. The idea that IQ is anywhere near a full measure of someone’s abilities is truly, completely wrong.

Don’t let the fact that you “couldn’t” do those things stop you from trying a myriad of other occupations where you may be successful and find fulfillment. If you believe that you can only be successful or fulfilled by being good at one of the latest occupations trending in media, please don’t. Someone can be successful and fulfilled doing pretty much just about anything. Some examples: building trades, mechanic, driver, janitor, cashier, cook, bartender, hairdresser, anything. FYI, I’ve heard that in France, people in any occupation demand and get the respect they deserve for being experts in whatever occupation they chose for themselves. Just as an example, my hairdresser told me an amusing story of arriving in Paris and stopping at a fruit stall where she promptly started to squeeze the fruit like we do in the US. The fruit stall minder literally smacked the fruit out of her hand and selected the fruit for her. He was the expert in fruit and she had no business picking the fruit herself.

It sounds like your main issues probably stem from your father’s neglect and abuse and perhaps your ADHD and other learning disabilities, not from your IQ. You would do well to address your drug addiction first with whatever treatment options are available to you (this would also impact your IQ test scores, but do yourself a favor and forget about IQ). After that, or maybe at the same time, if you didn’t graduate high school, work towards getting your GED. After that, enroll in community college and take whatever variation of “succeeding in college” (study skills) and “career exploration” classes they offer as your very first classes. After that, many options should present themselves to you in community college. Focus on the careers that you can do with either only a high school / GED diploma, or that plus trade school or community college. Many community colleges also provide mental health counseling and assistance finding jobs. Take advantage of any opportunity you encounter.

I, like apparently many others here, believe in you! The answer to your question is yes, there is hope for you!

Ah, yes, I forgot about game jams! They sound like they would really help you spend some concentrated time on game dev and design and progress quickly. Thanks.

You’re welcome. Maybe you don’t have to make all 20, but I think the idea is just to get your feet wet with game development with simple stuff first (baby steps), rather than diving into the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim. Maybe you’ll feel you have the hang of it after making a handful of them.

It’s essentially the “how do you eat an elephant?” question, isn’t it? Hint, if you’re not familiar with the reference, the answer is “one bite at a time.”

I’m not a game developer (yet), but would like to try it, so I’ve done a little reading about the topic. There are a couple things I’ve seen advocated that have made a lot of sense to me:

1. Don’t start with your dream game. Start with either tiny games to test specific aspects of your bigger game, or first practice developing clones of many relatively simple classic games, like pac-man, etc. This is a good resource I’ve found to help guide the latter approach: https://20_games_challenge.gitlab.io/challenge/

2. Don’t spend a lot of time on either programming or creating art before you playtest the heck out of your game, preferably with many people. This is what I’ve seen advocated in a popular game design textbook: https://www.gamedesignworkshop.com/ - this makes sense since the same kind of advice applies to any kind of software development and design - verify that your potential audience is actually interested in what you are trying to make before spending a ton of effort making it. I’ve seen very similar advice given in the context of solo app development and even business startups.

Good luck and have fun!

Good idea, after having just spent quite a while setting mine and troubleshooting them (first time samba user).

I haven’t used the tool below, but I’ve seen it be recommended. Might it be kind of what you’re looking for?

https://github.com/45Drives/cockpit-file-sharing

Although I’m not surprised, it is interesting that the same big tech companies like Apple and Microsoft taking stances on being “environmentally conscious” while also ignoring forced obsoletion of old hardware.

That’s purely greenwashing marketing hype, with Apple being the worst offender. Now Microsoft seems to be following in their footsteps, although they’re still better in this regard than Apple.

Interesting, thanks!

Ah, interesting, thanks! The wikipedia article on PeerTube explains that it is indeed user peer to peer to some extent, using WebTorrent. I had no idea. Very interesting.

Wait, I thought that PeerTube was peer to peer in the sense that the various PeerTube server instances were peers, and not the users clicking and watching videos were peers. Am I mistaken? It seems that in order for the users to peer, they would need to either install a client program that would do that, or make some heavy browser security approvals. If it’s the servers that are peering, then this law shouldn’t apply to the users.

I agree that this is veering way off topic, but you seem to like to argue semantics.

My main point was that Biden, at that time a senator of a majority Democratic state, voted with Republicans and a minority of Democratic senators of mostly conservative states to pass a bill that would benefit his largest donor, MBNA, as well as other banks, to the detriment of common people. While the OP may have overstated Biden’s involvement with this bill, you seem to be understating it.

Yes, it is. Visa and Mastercard are not card issuers. Example: “Visa does not issue cards, extend credit or set rates and fees for consumers; rather, Visa provides financial institutions with Visa-branded payment products that they then use to offer credit, debit, prepaid and cash access programs to their customers.”

This article provides details of why Delaware is attractive to banks (various financial and legal incentives), how it became that way (legislation written by major bank lawyers), and some ways it benefits from this (jobs, tax revenue).

Biden didn’t earn the nickname “The Senator from MBNA” for no reason. MBNA was a huge credit card company that was later bought[?] by Bank of America. “Over the past 20 years [as of 2008], MBNA has been Biden’s single largest contributor.”

Student loans seem to be a massive part of the problem of out of control tuition increases. The National Bureau of Economic Research published this study in 2016 that showed that changes to the Federal Student Loan Program accounted for the majority of the 106% increase in tuition between 1987 and 2010. Whether that’s some right-wing scheme to divert attention from reduction of states’ funding of public universities I haven’t looked into, but it seems to me that it’s at least a significant factor on its face.

I had edited my post to add that he didn’t do it himself but was critical in getting in passed. Perhaps you started your reply before my edit.

I would have settled for him having done less in getting it passed. Your version of what happened or may have happened is way too charitable to Biden. He was known for being very friendly to banks and credit card companies, as a Senator from Delaware would be inclined to be, considering that Delaware is home to many of those types of businesses.

While he didn’t do it by himself, his support was critical in getting it passed:

“Biden was one of the most powerful people who could have said no, who could have changed this. Instead he used his leadership role to limit the ability of other Democrats who had concerns and who wanted the bill softened,” said Melissa Jacoby, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill specialising in bankruptcy.

Yes, good possibilities. I see you’ve struck a chord, because you’re already being downvoted again. I see I was downvoted too. lol

Absolutely no idea why you’re getting downvoted. CEOs browsing Lemmy?

Thanks for the additional info and explanation. That makes sense, but I realize now that I must have made a mistake. The NPR piece I was referencing was not the one you linked but another one that I had pulled up when I was trying to learn more about this: https://www.npr.org/2021/01/15/956842958/what-we-know-so-far-a-timeline-of-security-at-the-capitol-on-january-6

Going by that timeline and narrative, it doesn’t seem like Mayor Bowser asked for a large contingent of the NG until the attack was already under way. I now also understand better why she may have erred in that way, because of what had happened in the previous BLM protest.

Wow, that Flynn appointment timing definitely looks shady as hell. As for the Capitol cops, I wouldn’t be surprised if they put up token resistance. Cops in general seemed to be on Trump’s and his fans’ side, what with all the back the blue rhetoric and all that. So now after this discussion I’m definitely leaning more towards any possible conspiracy being all on the side of the people who wanted the insurrection to succeed, with some lucky help in the form of some people on the other side having acted with incompetence.

Thanks again.

I found another source explaining it from experience: https://www.grandin.com/humane/cap.bolt.tips.html

It seems that we may both be partially correct: If a penetrating bolt is used the animal is killed instantly. If a non-penetrating bolt is used, the animal sometimes revives. What we don’t know is how prevalent each approach is. Either way, re-reading your initial post that I responded to I realized that this debate doesn’t matter. Your point seems to have been that they don’t feel pain as they’re killed, and I concede that you’re correct. I missed that this was the point you were making, and that you were not mainly arguing whether the animals were killed instantly or not.

Edit: Just to add that I concede the point that they don’t feel pain only in a general sense. Looking at that last link, it seems that this procedure would have a lot of room for error and I’m sure that as a consequence a lot of cows suffer unintentionally.

What else would you need in order to believe that this was a planned assault on democracy, coordinated directly with the white house and designed to take advantage of a legitimate peaceful protest?

I know it was a planned assault on democracy. I never said otherwise. I also know who had fomented and planned the assault: the people in the White House and all their die-hard followers. None of that is in question. What I was unsure about was who had fucked up and allowed it to happen that day. I had never looked very closely at the details of the events of that day, but I read the NPR and Politico stories you sent. The picture that those paint to me is that a lot of people primarily responsible for securing this event fucked up leading up to it. With all that intelligence that shit was going to go down, the local authorities should have had their shit together, ready for it. They could have asked the National Guard to be in place ahead of time, but didn’t think it was necessary despite having access to the intelligence and were worried about what had happened previously with the BLM protests. If they’re having to call the National Guard after people start rushing the capitol, it’s way too late. From the time that the crowd reaches the security lines at the capitol until the time that the protester is shot trying to enter the House chamber is less than 1 hour 45 minutes. And it sounds like the call goes out to the NG after the crowd reached the capitol.

I didn’t realize or recall that Michael Flynn’s brother was one of the generals involved in the decision to send in the National Guard. WTF, he was probably in no hurry to send in the troops. However, I still argue that the people who were intent on securing the event should not have given anyone the opportunity of a delayed response that could have been obscured by the chaos. Aside from that, what are the chances that the situation could have potentially been even worse had the NG been involved? Can you imagine the endless whining from the MAGAs if more of them had been mowed down by the NG?